Moderate Republicans lend sympathetic ears to McKay blasts

By NEIL MODIE, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, May 20, 2007

WENATCHEE -- Fired U.S. Attorney John McKay accused senior Justice Department officials Sunday of "lies and cover-ups" and possibly criminal acts, and he found a sympathetic audience -- of Republicans, no less.

Some GOP loyalists might consider him a political traitor for helping to fuel bipartisan congressional demands for the ouster of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the wake of the firings of McKay and eight fellow U.S. attorneys, possibly for political reasons. But the Mainstream Republicans of Washington viewed McKay as worthy of repeated applause.

At their annual convention here, members of the statewide organization of moderate and center-right Republicans clapped enthusiastically when McKay, the former U.S. attorney for Western Washington, declared that the "enormous power" vested in federal prosecutors "cannot be associated with partisan politics."

More applause came when he recited his Republican Party credentials and declared his fealty to GOP principles but criticized some of the party's tactics:

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"What we've done is take issues like gay marriage and rubbed people's noses in it. ... We raise abortion up on the flagpole every single time to create dissension, to create some line that has nothing to do with what Republicans are about. We should accept people into the party who have divergent views, on immigration, on gay marriage."

Those remarks were well received by the Mainstream Republicans, who largely shun conservative activists' focus on divisive social issues. Their leaders include former U.S. Rep. Sid Morrison and Secretary of State Sam Reed.

McKay has spoken before congressional panels and editorial boards in making his case that the firings smelled of improper political considerations, but this was his first Republican audience. He didn't hold back on accusations that have placed the Bush White House on the defensive and imperiled Gonzales' job.

When he was told Dec. 7 that he was to resign, McKay said, he intended to go quietly, out of a feeling of loyalty to the Bush administration that appointed him, "until I heard the attorney general of the United States being less than truthful in front of the United States Senate, followed in short order by the deputy attorney general ... being less than truthful in front of the United States Senate."

He said he and at least five of the other fired U.S. attorneys compared notes and concluded that "if we did remain silent, we were part of the lie, so that is why I spoke out."

Since then, McKay added, "senior officials at the Department of Justice have compounded early misstatements with lies and with cover-ups."

In McKay's audience was King County Councilman Reagan Dunn, a rising GOP star who was an assistant U.S. attorney under McKay for two years. "That was one of the most powerful and interesting speeches I have ever heard," Dunn exclaimed to the gathering at the end of McKay's speech.

Dunn said afterward that he felt McKay had been wronged.

McKay said he has no intention of running for political office, as some have speculated, and is troubled by the furor over the firings because "I felt this responsibility as a Republican (that) I did not want to be in the public arena handing spears to the Democrats to throw at the White House."

He said that while the several congressional and internal Justice Department investigations of the firings are well founded, "I think (Democrats) would love to have this thing dragged well into next year, a presidential election year, to benefit pure politics." For that reason, he said, he hopes the investigations get resolved soon.

McKay took a few licks at conservative critics who have complained that he should have brought criminal charges over the contested, error-drenched 2004 governor's election that saw Democrat Chris Gregoire defeat Republican Dino Rossi by 133 votes. Some state Republicans complained about it to Bush administration officials.

McKay said he still doesn't know if that was the reason he was fired. but he said that if Rossi, whom he has never met, runs against Gregoire again next year, he will enthusiastically support him.

He referred dismissively to "cybercowards," apparently meaning conservative bloggers who have criticized the lack of prosecution, and scorned the purported evidence of election fraud alleged by Tom McCabe, the aggressive, conservative executive vice president of the Building Association of Washington and a Rossi supporter.

McKay said he, four other federal prosecutors and a number of FBI agents conducted an exhaustive investigation of McCabe's complaint. He said McCabe's allegation that he, McKay, "failed to follow this up is utterly false and he knows it."

McKay said the evidence McCabe presented was "a joke from an evidentiary standpoint that a crime had been committed. ... Every FBI agent who looked at the evidence and every federal prosecutor who looked at the evidence that the BIAW sent in concluded that it was completely, utterly insufficient to move forward in an investigation."

He acknowledged that reports of ballot problems in the 2004 election "smelled pretty bad" and were "troubling." But he told reporters after his speech that a federal criminal prosecution would require proof of criminal intent to influence the outcome of the election, and there was none.

The ballot-counting problems "could be a mistake, it could be incompetence, it could be a lot of other things" besides a criminal conspiracy, he said.